The Hindu Business Line : Holy and hunted

AN ELEPHANT CROSSES the highway leading to Gudalur at Mudumalai Sanctuary in Nilgiris. Man-animal conflicts have become common after several migratory routes were encroached. — K. Ananthan

Elephant stories are commonly retailed in Kerala with most temples having their lovable pachyderms. They carry the Lord's many names and the residents are on first-name terms with them.

Guruvayur Kesavan is one elephant, which easily pops out of the mind. Years ago, when this writer visited the Lord Krishna temple at Guryvayur, he saw a large, coloured painting of a famed elephant which did temple duty for years. One is not sure if the painting is still around. In that vivid collection of Malayalam stories, styled the Aithihyamala, aana kathagal (elephant tales) form an important part and is still read by many. They do not talk of the animal in the wild nor is there any detail on the way it was tamed.

Elephants turn humans and for their mahouts they are their dear wards. One was not aware it was the same in the North-East and neighbouring Bangladesh. Recently, Mahesh Rangarjan sent me a book on Elephas maximus — A Trunk Full of Tales by Dhriti K. Lahiri Choudhury. One spent a few enjoyable nights reading the book.

Lahiri has spent an entire life time of 70 years with the Indian elephant and he fetchingly writes: "There is nothing more soothing to the nerves than seeing an elephant munching away contentedly on its little packets of paddy, salt and jaggery." This writer agrees as he recalls watching a tethered elephant feeding on a collection of leaves and fruits, harvested from adjacent forests, near the Lord Ganesh temple in Kottarakara. The mahout never allowed one to go near the beast. One watched from a distance as the animal tapped the coconut palm leaves on his legs with his trunk before thrusting it into a cave-like mouth, while continuing to nod his body. He never stood still.

Lahiri's great-grandfather had more than 30 animals in his pilkhana (elephant stable) and maintained them by setting apart a portion of the income from his landed estates.

Without tarrying, Lahiri gets the reader on to his subject: "Children used to learn about the facts of life from birds and bees. Our wisdom in this area came from elephants. We eavesdropped as our elders, reclining against bolsters in the baithak khana, avidly discussed the private lives of our elephants. Let us however begin, Alice-like, at the beginning and go through the middle, but no stopping at the end just now, if you please; for I cannot rest, at least not yet, all set as I am to sail beyond the sunset, to see in the Happy Isles the great Jatra Prasad, Chandrachud, Sher Bahadur, Shakti Prasad and Chanchal Piyari, all of whom I knew, and the equally great, if not greater, Bansi Bahadur, Nurjahan, Bholanath, Shambu Prasad and Jung Bahadur, whom I came to know of as a child, mostly as colourful chapters in family lore."

For Lahiri, Rajkumar Prakitish Chandra Barua, popularly called Lalji, is the greatest living authority on the capture and taming of wild Indian elephants. (Lalji is now dead.) In the elephant world of traders, phandis (elephant nooser), mahouts and their assistants, he is Baba. He shot his first leopard at the age of nine and the first tiger at 11. In 1964, he shot his 61st tiger and that was to be his last. Since the age of 22, he stumbled into a regular routine of leaving Gouripur after Kali Puja in October to move into the forest with his elephants till March 31. Then back to Gouripur with a month-long monsoon capture in June and out again in October, writes Lahiri.

Since 1974, Baba has been living through the year in the North Bengal forests chasing away wild elephants from destroying crops. "Lalji is one of the last of the disappearing generation. ... He, unlike his many sporting peers from the same social milieu, chose to make forests and elephants not a pastime but a passion and a way of life. Today, that way of life, the surroundings, the milieu, above all the forests with their teeming wildlife which made Lalji what he is, are gone," comments Lahiri.

And in the book, Lahiri describes the many marauding elephants he gunned down for no fault of theirs. With their forests going, they have been straying into farmlands and humans have not liked it a bit. In some ways, Lahiri mimics the tone and style of Jim Corbett who knocked down troublesome tigers. Reading them one felt sad.

Yet as one went along, one came upon some traits of the animal in the forest. "A solitary male elephant, when resting, usually faces the direction of the track along which it had come. Therefore, straightforward spooring has to be abandoned in this final stage, and one must try an out-flanking movement. This is crucial in very dense cover with zero visibility. Many sportsmen have noted this tendency in the solitary Indian bison (Bos gaurus), but none that I know of in solitary male Asian elephants," remarks Lahiri.

Is there a way out of killing wild elephants, who have moved out of thinning forests or forests sans corridors? In India, there is a general drop in elephant numbers coupled with local over-population; no reliable estimates on elephant population are available. He admits, "a killer elephant can be domesticated and trained, and need not necessarily be eliminated."

With modern medicines, a wild Elephas maximus can be tranquilised and trained in a kraal. There is the Karnataka practice of allowing the wild animal to cool down in the kraal and then training them outside between koonkis (domesticated elephants) in the North-East Indian manner, a process taking three months. This, the author, argues is preferable to training in the kraal as in Tamil Nadu. The more elephants widen their home range, more the collisions with humans. But that does not justify praying to Lord Ganesha in temples and slaughtering him in the wild.

P. Devarajan

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